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How It Started

“Kerryn Leitch used to run a book club at the Beijing Bookworm. Sometime after she left for Cambodia, but before the Bookworm went defunct, one Matthew Byrne asked me if I had an idea for a new Spittoon event. We were on the Spittoon Literary Tour, enjoying a late drunken evening in Chengdu. A fourth event would mean something Spittoon going on every Thursday of the month. As we were sitting outside the Chengdu Bookworm, a book club was the first thing that leapt to mind.”

Choosing the Books

“I am caught between elitist and democratic impulses. I want to choose books that other people in the group will read. But at the same time, I’m the only one in the group that actually has to read them. There are so many good books I haven’t read yet, and I have this dread that there is somewhere out there that one perfect book I am meant to read, but also that I will die before ever discovering it. Getting stuck with a book I’m not into is like a wasted month of life. Luckily, the people who show up tend to be pretty smart and suggest good stuff. The best is when we end up reading something amazing that I would never find on my own.”

Favourite Memories

“Usually it is when someone has a special connection to the book. There have been several occasions when someone plopped a book stuffed with colour-coded post-it notes down on the table. That always heralds a good discussion. When we read The Baron in the Trees, someone showed up who had spent the Covid lockdown binge reading Calvino, and by coincidence this one was her favourite. Or when we read Nada, and Ana brought homemade empanadas. Books do funny things to people.”

Deva’s Favourite Book

“Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut. I wouldn’t even claim it’s the best book ever written; it has everything to do with when I discovered it as an angst-ridden teenager in small town Idaho. I hated school, was failing English. There was a sleepover, and I was the first one to wake up, so I wandered down to my friend’s basement. A dog-eared paperback was sitting on a pile of laundry or something, so I started flipping through it out of boredom.”

The passage that got him:

“1492. The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.”

“I just sat reading in the basement until my parents came to get me, totally ignoring my friends. After that I obsessively read everything I could find by Vonnegut, even as I continued to fail English, and I’ve stayed reading something ever since.”

January 2021: Wang Xiaobo’s In Love and Bondage

The January 2021 book club discussion focused on Wang Xiaobo’s In Love and Bondage, a collection of three anti-establishment novellas including The Golden Age, East Palace West Palace, and 2015. Wang’s transgressive works skewer conservatism through absurdist satire and are noted for containing some of the first treatments of male homosexual relationships in modern Chinese literature. Though acknowledged as one of the most important writers in 20th-century China, his bent towards black comedy, sex, and absurdity made him something of a dark horse within the canon.

Wang Xiaobo (1952 to 1997) was a novelist, essayist, and short story writer born in Beijing. During the Cultural Revolution he was sent to Yunnan for rustification, later returned to study economics at Renmin University, earned a Master’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh, then returned to China to teach. He died at 44.

Originally published on the Spittoon WeChat channel. The event took place on Thursday 7th January 2021 at Camera Stylo, No.64 Dongsi Shi Yi Tiao, Dongcheng District, Beijing.